Hey everyone! Today, I share the mic with Mike McDerment, the CEO and Founder of FreshBooks, an accounting solution that offers simple and innovative ways to handle your financial books.
Tune in to hear Mike share how FreshBooks built their user base to 20 million users, the pricing model and growth rates that they use, and the particular moment that Mike felt his company might die!
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Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Kirk Simpson, CEO and Co-Founder of Wave, a service that offers free invoice, accounting, credit card processing, and payroll software.
Tune in to hear how Wave plans to eliminate friction for small businesses, how the business saw a 26% conversion rate on their landing pages early on, and what Kirk uses to maintain peace throughout his extremely busy day.
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Hey everyone, in this episode, I share the mic with Ismael Wrixen, CEO of FE International, an experienced website broker who offers highly personalized service and access to a large network of investors looking to buy and sell successful websites.
Listen as we discuss FE International’s content marketing strategy and why they invest in people rather than distribution, the power of building client trust, the unique value adds that give them a 95% success rate, and why you shouldn’t over-value churn rate.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: How Website Brokers FE International Sold $60M Worth of Online Businesses Very Quickly TRANSCRIPT
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How do you get smarter?
Simple—you ingest as much information as you can and parse out the information that really resonates with you. Warren Buffett spends over 5 hours reading each day just so he can keep up with the important events happening around him.
People often talk about reading books, listening to audiobooks/podcasts, going to conferences and reading blog posts. How about newsletters?
Although numbers show that e-mail is starting to die, it’s still a highly engaging channel. It’s still one of the best ways to drive revenues online. So engaging in fact, that for every $1 spent on e-mail marketing, the average return is $44.25.
E-mail engagement has been decreasing over the years. Just take a look at this image from Bear and Beam:
The most important thing is getting the right information in front of you since so many e-mail newsletters are just an abundance of promotional spam.
But if you can get it right, the information flowing to you will be an invaluable addition to your content consumption schedule. If one of the richest men in the world can make time to read 5+ hours a day, I’m sure you can block out some time to as well.
I tend to skip a lot of e-mail newsletters, but there are a select few that I hold dear to my heart because I LEARN a lot from them. The newsletters I subscribe to cover the following:
If you’re an entrepreneur (or aspiring entrepreneur), it’ll be beneficial for you to check at least one of these out. Venture capital is always interesting to me because it points to where capital is flowing for ‘the next big thing’.
Without further ado, I’m pleased to share my favorite newsletters (in no particular order):
Investor and Digg founder Kevin Rose curates a monthly newsletter with his latest ramblings. He shares favorite products he likes, how-to’s that he finds useful, his favorite TED talks, interesting topics (e.g. fasting, ice baths, etc.), and more.
You can sign up for it here <==
Tim Ferriss’ weekly newsletter gives you a peek into the world of the best-selling author. He’ll recommend books, something he really enjoyed reading that week, interesting quotes, and a recent purchase.
You can sign up for it here <==
This is by far my most favorite venture capital newsletter for the week. It’s PACKED with information on things that I typically don’t think about (e.g. emerging layers, world diseases, how the world is running out of groundwater, and more).
There are a lot of things in this world that you don’t know you don’t know. But when you start to move things to the territory of ‘know you don’t know’, you can start to take control and go deeper down the rabbit hole on subjects that you’re truly interested in. If you haven’t seen my interview with Social Capital Partner Mamoon Hamid, go listen to it now. You’ll enjoy it!
You can sign up for it here <==
KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg co-founder Hiten Shah is someone I consider to be a mentor figure who’s always consuming and sharing interesting knowledge. Just follow his Twitter or Facebook and you’ll find that to be the case. Luckily, he also curates a weekly digest of his favorite readings which is even more valuable because he’s spent the time to distill what really resonated with him. You can listen to my interview with him here.
You can sign up for it here <==
Echosign (sold to Adobe) co-founder and SaaS godfather Jason Lemkin knows a thing or two when it comes to software-as-a-service (Saas). In fact, he throws one of the best conferences in San Francisco each year called the SaaStr annual.
For people building a software subscription business, this is a must-have. In fact, you should also add his Quora posts to your list of reading material because it’s damn good. So good, in fact, that he has crossed well over 10 million views. If you haven’t checked out my action-packed interview with him, you can listen in right here.
You can sign up for it here <==
The Mattermark Daily is a hand-curated newsletter compiled daily to bring you first-person accounts of entrepreneurship, investment, and insights from the startup ecosystem. I enjoy the weekly digest the most because it features the top 10 posts. You’ll learn about topics such as fundraising, first-time founder lessons, convertible debt, and more.
You can sign up for it here <==
How many of you get confused by the world of finance? I certainly do. What if I told you there was a newsletter that condenses important financial news and makes it understandable to a 5th grader? Well, maybe not that simple, but you get the point that I’m trying to make.
I think it’s important to understand what’s going on in the financial markets but when I don’t have a strong understanding of the vernacular, it makes my eyes just glaze over. Finimize calls itself ‘pocket-sized financial news’ and it’s exactly that. Each tidbit of news is broken down into sections:
You can sign up for it here <==
CBInsights’ digest is another great newsletter that talks about emerging industries, venture capital, and disruptive startups. There’s more of a flair/attitude to this newsletter because they aren’t afraid to speak their mind. If they think something sucks, they’ll tell you upfront.
As with a lot of venture capital newsletter, it’s LOADED with data. In fact, content marketing has consistently been one of their top growth drivers for the past few years. You can listen to my interview with CEO Anand Sanwal on how he gets $1,000+ signups per month using content marketing.
You can sign up for it here <==
Growth Hackers is a marketing community where people share growth strategies and tactics. Top posts are upvoted by the community to make it easier to find the “best of the best” content. Topics on growth hacking include growth case studies, AMA with marketing executives, advertising, SEO, and more.
To get access, simply sign up to be a member of Growth Hackers.
HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah and Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin teamed up a few years ago to create an inbound marketing community. Inbound.org is similar to Growth Hackers in the sense that the best posts are pushed to the top via upvotes from members of the community. Topics you’ll typically see will center around SEO, conversion rate optimization, copywriting, and more. They also have great discussions on the forum itself.
To get access, simply sign up to be a member of Inbound.org.
In today’s age where 2.7 million blog posts are published each day, it’s hard to tell signal from noise. But when you’re able to fine tune your radar and truly hone in on information that matters to you, you’ve struck gold. From there, you’ll be able to quickly parse out the most relevant information and take action that will make an impact on your life.
How many newsletters do you subscribe to? What are some of your favorites?
Hello everyone! Today on the show we have Raj Bhaskar, co-founder and CEO of Hudlr, a mobile finance app for freelancers and entrepreneurs to manage their business finances. This is his second software venture; his first was real estate management software for affordable public housing called VisualHOMES that was acquired by Yardi Systems in 2010.
Today we’re talking about how Hurdlr helps Uber drivers save 20-30% annually, the strategy that got them over 20,000 users in the first 6 months, and the one unique thing that Hudlr is doing to acquire more customers.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: Hurdlr’s Simple But Genius Approach That Got Them 3,000 New Users From One Blog Post TRANSCRIPT
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Today I’ve got another book recommendation: Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements.
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Today I’m going to list out some online and offline resources you can go to learn more about finance and operations. A lot of focus goes to product, sales and customer service. There isn’t anything wrong with that, but you do need to get your finance and operations down too.
Hello and welcome to another edition of Growth Bites.
Today we are going to be talking about where you can go online and also offline to learn about finance and operations in general.
We’re all focused on building a great product. We’re all focused on building a great service. We’re all focused on sales. That’s great stuff but, if you’re an entrepreneur or if you’re a senior executive, you have to get your finance and operations down. And I certainly have a lot to work on when it comes to that stuff. And really, the stuff that you might learn when you’re trying to get an MBA, but most entrepreneurs doesn’t have an MBA. So, there’s a lot of good resources online that I found and I do know that there’s a gap that I’m missing when it comes to this stuff. And I’m not just talking aobut the balance sheet type of stuff. I’m talking about getting a little more granular as to where you should be looking at such as a CVP analysis and things like that.
So, what I like to do is when I go on YouTube, there is a channel called MBA Bullshit. And he talks all about different Finance and more operational stuff that would be helpful to you as a entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur. So, that’s MBA Bullshit. Check out that channel. It’s a great one. Khan Academy has been pretty good as well. What Simon Con’s initial videos when you look at economics, you look at markets, you look at finance. In general, he teaches some good stuff around. At least, helps you establish some good foundation that go off for first. By no means, it’s going to replace a course. Definitely, if you do have an opportunity to take a course, go on and do it. What I’ve heard is that, I’ve heard some great things about the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program. Not sure, if it’s just exclusive to L.A. I’m hoping that it’s around the United States. But they have port about 500 million dollars about this program. It’s really intensive and there’s a lot of commitment. You probably dedicating, we’re probably talking about 8-10 hours a week, just to learn and just to really get your hands dirty when it comes to business. So, they’re going to put you on a cohort with other entrepreneurs in your space to interview you as well. And then, you get into it. It’s completely free to do it. You just have to be committed. And if you even missed one class, they’ll kick you out. So, definitely check it out. Goldman Sachs is teaching something like this. It’s worth doing it, especially if it’s free. Just to get yourself to the next level when it comes to knowing the stuff.
So, again it’s MBA Bullshit. That’s the first one. Second one is Khan Academy. Both of these are, they’ll get you the rudimentary understanding. Other than that, you can buy some books and continue to Google around, check out some other YouTube videos. But I found those two to be a good starting point. And then, when you want to go a little more deeper, check out Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses.
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